ZeroFOX sets up research team to expose social media threats

ZeroFOX announced the formalization of the industry’s first security research team dedicated to exposing social media threats, driving innovative defensive technology and codifying social media security best practices.

In complement to ZeroFOX’s longstanding R&D efforts, the newly dedicated ZeroFOX Research team will apply advanced security expertise, data science and machine learning to the dynamic social media threat vector. Its charter is to identify associated cybersecurity trends, explore attacker tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), and help drive technology innovations and best practices to remediate threats.

The formalization of this team comes on the heels of the largest increase in social media attacks since 2013. Network compromise via social media outpaces all other web based attacks, beating email by a factor of 10x. Customer and brand fraud on social are being launched 75 percent faster than can be remediated, and CXO accounts are among the most targeted.

In conjunction with this announcement, ZeroFOX has named Mike Raggo as chief research officer. Raggo brings more than 20 years of security research experience to the role to join the existing team of security researchers, data scientists and industry veterans.

As former director of security research at MobileIron, Raggo authored numerous books, and he is a former security trainer, red teamer and a participating member of the PCI Mobile Task Force and FSISAC/BITS, as well as a frequent presenter at security conferences.

Making their debut at Black Hat USA 2016, ZeroFOX Research will present the world’s first end-to-end social media penetration testing and educational tool, which utilizes machine learning to create automated, personalized spear phishing attacks.

“As social media becomes a major platform for business communication, cybercriminals are exploiting its inherent trust and widespread connectivity to target employees and customers more and more every day,” commented James C. Foster, co-founder of ZeroFOX.

“As the pioneer in this social media threat space, it’s our job to shine a light on new threats in order to help our clients make more informed security decisions. With the virtual explosion in scale and impact of social media threats, it is time we have a dedicated team of experts in security, neural science, machine learning and social media to lead the industry against these threats.”

The ZeroFOX Platform continuously monitors across social media for security risks and business threats targeting employees, customers and organizations. Using intelligent data collection and an automated scriptable analysis engine, the ZeroFOX Platform automatically identifies and remediates impersonator accounts, phishing attacks, fraud, customer scams, exposed personally identifiable information (PII) and more.